This may be too late to help, but I have always liked the idea of getting
students to actually collect data about something that interests them. Of
course, getting boys to admit to being interested in something other than girls,
sports, and cars is tough. There are a series of preparatory tasks that are
educational in themselves. When they collect data and try to summarize it, they
will see the relevance in the traditional descriptive statistics organization.

This material is based upon work supported by the
National Science Foundation under Grant DUE-0226284.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations
expressed in this material are those of the author(s)
and do not necessarily reflect the views of the
National Science Foundation.